A Devil for Love
by lotuskasumi
Summary: From a prompt on Tumblr: "whouffaldi prompt: twelve has been pretending he isn't in love with clara since he regenerated, but then there's a life and death situation that he doesn't think they can get out of, that sHE can get out of, and his confessions just fall out of his mouth." (Whouffle/Twelve x Clara. K for scary bits and slight body horror.)


The trip began and ended very much the same, with short, terse questions, skittish looks, and lapses of silence.

Three weeks had been nothing compared to this particular absence. A month full and proper had passed and then passed again with no sign in the sky of anything significant besides the usual growth and collapse of the moon. No blue box. No bizarre flashing lights — no lights of any kind, not really. Her world had faded into an uncomfortable backdrop of oppressive grey.

But there _was_ Pink to be grateful for, a Danny Pink to be precise — at least, she could be grateful for him when her filterless mouth didn't muck everything up. And Clara valued the company she had sought that seemed to so dearly adore hers, and she knew better than to compare smiles and laughs and senses of humor and touches … But there was nothing quite like that blue.

In the car on the way to work, Tori Amos would tell her about it. _Never seen blue like the blue that he drives, over and around and through me again. _Clara didn't previously believe that mp3 players could develop psychic links, but she was starting to believe in it now.

One night, she fell asleep on a smear of scattered essays, half-listening to _Breakfast at Tiffany's_ play on the television set she had only purchased to have something to take up the empty space in her flat. She dreamed that Holly Golightly sat next to her on the couch, smoking that ridiculously long cigarette and dressed in her pink sequined best, but she was shaking her head and staring at Clara with a look the latter had begun to recognize at work: a kind of pitying understanding, eyes that say _I told you so_ without ever telling a word.

"Ever have those days where you get the mean reds?" Holly asked her.

Clara shook her head. "The mean reds… You mean like the blues?" she asked, mirroring and mimicking Fred in the film.

Holly laughed. "No, _you'd _know about the blues, darling. That color is your jurisdiction." She pressed the cigarette to her lips and fluttered her lashes, and Clara tried not to cough.

"D'you mind?"

"No, I don't. But _you_ do."

"Clearly." And Clara lowered her head in the dream as she raised it on the couch, half-awake and groping for the remote to shut the movie off. She watched, bleary-eyed, as Holly wept and confessed all the bruised corners of her heart to Fred — dear Fred, poor Fred. But that wasn't really his name.

_"_I'm not going to let anyone put me in a cage_," _Holly cried.

"I don't wanna put you in a cage, I wanna_ love you_!"

"It's the _same thing_!"

"Shut up," Clara said, and shut the movie off. She had spent so long dreaming and then snapping at the television, she didn't notice that she had company until he joined her at the couch.

"Long day, Teach?" he asked, half joking, mostly wondering, but in the sort of tone that was as flat as if all the finer points of emotion had been beset by hammers.

"Two months," Clara said after a pause, gathering up the papers and taking the time to alphabetize them so that it would take longer to look at him. "_Two months_," she repeated, because he had said nothing.

"Yeah, I'm sorry about that," the Doctor replied.

"You don't sound sorry."

"Well I got – "

"If you say distracted…"

"_Displaced_. There, that a better word?"

"It's not the word that matters, I don't give a damn about the word."

"Words words words," he said, tired and displeased and not at all close to earning Clara's sympathy.

"Don't get clever, it doesn't suit you." She stood up, turned to him – and stopped.

His smile was wretchedly sarcastic, a little sickle smirk that cut across her heart until it was nothing but pulp. That wasn't the problem. His smiles, however bitter, rarely were problems. One of his eyes had gone black, all color and white gone. There were little red cracks around the edges of his eye, blending in with all those wrinkles and forks like the feet of crows, but they didn't look like wounds to Clara. They weren't bleeding, for one thing – but they were painful to see, and she could only imagine they were painful enough to _bear_. Like a secret or a sin.

"Doctor – your _eye_. What happened to your eye?"

"Noticed, have you?" He raised his hand to his face and passed it over his eye as if trying to dislodge sleep or an eyelash. But the color, or the lack of it, stayed in place.

The Doctor pushed himself to his feet and made for the mirror in Clara's hallway, an oval pane of glass lined with chipping gold paint. He hunched a bit to peer into it, leaning close to the glass as if to test the reflection's ability to stand the sight of him.

Clara was there at this side in an instant, her dream and its imagined argument and worries about pinks and blues all thoroughly abandoned. Her heart was in her throat like a wild, thrashing thing, and she put her hands on his arm to give them a place to rest as well as to offer some sort of comfort. They were doing no good to anyone twisting into fists at her side, slicing up her palms with the nails she forgot to bite down to worried nubs.

"What happened?" she asked again, quieter, gently, the way she sometimes had to talk Danny out of a dream that left him howling.

"Ran into some trouble. Planet of the eye snatchers, only they don't just _snatch_eyes, they snatch what's in them."

"… And what's in them?"

"D'you want the complicated answer or the poetic answer? Of course, poetics are complicated to just about everyone but the poet."

"You're stalling."

"I am not stalling, I'm _talking_. And you didn't answer the question. Complicated or poetic?"

"The truth. What happened. _To. Your eye?_"

His gaze was on Clara's reflection, reading the expression written there carefully. Slowly, very slowly, with the sort of tenderness that hurt, the Doctor covered his blackened eye with one hand and turned to look at Clara.

_He thinks I don't want to see it. _Clara reached out and pulled hard on his arm, tugging it down and freeing that awful, unnatural eye so she could peer between it and the other, paler kind. Its other set was no less darker, but with a shadow of a different sort darkening its depths. It was the shadow of age and experience and Time, Time as a force unknowable and unkind.

And they waited like that, her hand on his arm, holding him tight; his eyes, both of them, fixed on her with a gaze both shadowed and unnatural – well, he was always unnatural, but not always terrifying. Not to her, at least.

Then finally, he answered.

* * *

><p>"So what's the planet called?" Clara asked.<p>

"Ruten."

"Pardon?"

"Say it with me now, Clara. _Roo-ten. _Go on, you do it."

"Roo-ten," she repeated, dragging out the word as she took a seat on the arm of the chair, one of the many new, strange features of his remodeled TARDIS. "Does it mean anything?"

"Change, flux. Vicissitudes. Metempsychosis. … Why?"

"Dunno, just… Making conversation." Clara kept her eyes down to avoid meeting the Doctor's own. She looked at her hands, pretending to care for the chipped varnish on her nails more than she actually did, and thought again about what the Doctor had said. _"Eyes aren't the windows to the soul, that's a rubbish expression – they're the cage. They're cages to all sorts of secrets."_

And while that had explained next to nothing about what happened to his eye in particular, the next statement shed some small, raw corner of light on a possible explanation. _"Secrets rot in the heart, Clara. But they do more than rot, they _corrupt."

"Who were you talking to?"

Clara glanced up from her hands and looked at the Doctor, but only in profile. His pale eye – she refused to say normal, that wouldn't be fair to the other one – was in sight, and he was fiddling idly with various parts and cogs and gears of the console. They hadn't left Earth yet – they hadn't properly left her flat, for that matter. She wondered what word he was waiting for: surely her presence was enough to let him know she was ready to go.

"Sorry?"

"In the dream. You were dreaming. Who were you talking to?"

"Holly Golightly."

That got a laugh, but it wasn't a nice one. "Vying for who's top banana in the shock department, were you?"

Clara could see nothing shocking about herself in the slightest, certainly not when he was in the room as well. "No. We were talking about colours."

"Colours."

She nodded and let the conversation fall flat again, returning to the words that had brought her on board in the first place. _"Now imagine a heart so packed with secrets its gone blacker than the darkest corner of the universe – then forget that analogy because that was awful, loaded with purple prose. No, wait, reimagine it, because that's perfect. Now imagine _two _hearts like that. Then imagine a malfunctioning Altruism Narthex in one of the last Salve Sanctums, housed directly on Ruten, run by a CEO interface that can no longer tell the difference between _burying _a secret and _burning it_into the bearer – which are two terribly different things, you'd think it'd have remembered the finer points… And then you've got an idea about what happened to this here eye o'mine."_

"What was the secret?" she asked, watching him getting ready to throw the TARDIS into gear. "I can ask that, you know. I could even help."

"How could you help?" The question was neither cruel nor doubtful, but spoken from a terrifying ache of need that it made Clara grow cold just to hear it.

"I dunno. I could… offer a trade for one of my own? Or… ask them… to patch you up? Though it'd be nice to know what they were after in the first place."

"A secret, Clara. Weren't you listening? A secret, the very worst of its kind. The kind they write poems and sonnets and scripts and blacklisted inter-office memos about." The Doctor turned to show his black, fathomless eye to Clara, and she could have sworn for a moment, just a moment, that there was something like sadness alive inside it. "The kind they call cages," he added, speaking slowly.

"_I don't wanna put you in a cage, I wanna love you!_" Her heart shuddered, alive inside her throat again. Clara took a minute to steady it before she spoke again. "And what can I do about all that?" she asked.

"A clever thing. I dunno. Something, anything – the usual magic."

Memories of Rusty and stars and warnings about how to avoid becoming a microwaved dish ran through Clara's mind, as did the unsaid statement tied up in the response. _He needs me. He's scared and he needs me. _"Again?"

"Always." One word, and so uncommonly vulnerable. And it was this word that made them take off.

* * *

><p>When they landed on Ruten and paused at the front door, Clara made sure to look straight on into those eyes. The black and the pale, nearly colorless blue stared back, revealing nothing. But Clara had seen enough already. More than enough, she'd seen everything that mattered for the present problem. His need for her was like a gilded cage or a pair of chains that fettered hearts, that wormed its way down to the marrow of bones. What had Rochester said, to his dear despairing Jane in the gardens of Thornfield? <em>"It is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. … I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt, and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly." <em>That. That fear, that faith, that fact. That is what Clara had seen in these new, still sad eyes.

She wouldn't call it love, though. No, that might be a mistake. She wouldn't call it love – not until he did so first.

"Leave it to me, Doctor. I'll take care of it," Clara said and she opened the door herself, stepping out into the pale white light of the Sanctum.

And he followed her, almost near enough to touch, but without ever closing off that little gap. This one wouldn't – he wasn't like that now. Clara had accepted that, made her peace with it, as much peace as there could be had with a change so severe one might miss it if they blinked.

_Don't think about that now, _she warned herself, straightening her shoulders and standing up as tall as she could. _Think about the plan._

… _Make a plan, then think about it._

* * *

><p>But it hadn't gone to plan – not that there had been a plan to have, all things considered; Clara was very much making it all up as she went along, as she usually did, thinking on her toes and usually capable of pulling off rather miraculous feats, if she did say so herself. But nevertheless: it hadn't gone to plan, it hadn't gone to anything <em>like <em>a plan, and had, in fact, turned as bad and wrong and horrible as anything could get. No matter how Clara demanded or reasoned or, yes, sometimes pleaded with the CEO interface in charge of the Narthex, nothing she said could make it understand why the Doctor should go back to the way he first was.

"This one saw a secret that needed burying so badly it almost screamed to be seen," the interface said, a shapeless, faceless shadow that spoke with all the ice cold precision of a dagger to the heart. "So this one made a choice. This one did as this one was told, as this one was born to do."

"That doesn't make sense," Clara argued as she flung her arms over the Doctor's shoulder, drawing him close even as he struggled to get away. "You're not making_sense_!"

"It's an interface, it thinks it's making perfect sense!" The Doctor hissed, eyes closed tight and teeth bared as he came close to screaming with pain. Clara watched as the little thorns of red broke out around his other eye, the pale one, the right one, the _normal_ one – there, she said it, and her heart cracked all over again. And when the Doctor opened his eyes they were both pitiless and black and she couldn't fight the tears. "You'd have better luck telling Ayn Rand she's being illogical!"

"But why would it care," she couldn't help but ask, pinning the Doctor to her lap with one hand and reaching out to create something like a shield out of her small, trembling arm. But the interface was not interested in getting closer or inflicting any more harm than it had already done – but _how _had it done any harm at all? Clara couldn't understand. "Why should it give a damn about _this_? Of all the secrets to know – of all the knowledge it could possibly have – why did it choose – ?"

She wanted to say it, she _should _have said it. But Clara couldn't get the word out through her fear. Not until he told her first.

Why should it matter? Why should this thing even care? Clara's mind raced through what little she knew in the few seconds she had to think. _Altruism Narthex. Salve Sanctum. CEO interface. CEO… _Could it be…?

Clara felt the Doctor's hand clawing at the back of her own and she held it as tightly as she could, squeezing until the bones in her own hand ached. The strength and force of her touch stopped him from screaming; her touch had reduced his voice to something like a normal tone, which was a marvelously impossible thing, given the circumstances.

"Why did it want you? Why's it after you?" Clara rocked him gently, the way she sometimes had to cradle herself after a dream so kind it burned her heart to remember it. Dreams of pale blue eyes and burning, brilliant stars; dreams of paths and roads and journeys so wide and brimming with wonder that one life wasn't enough, not nearly enough. They would need dozens of lives, hundreds – thousands, even… Echoes and copies…

"Displaced… She was displaced. I found her and thought I could – thought I might – "

"Her?" Clara asked, looking from his miserably wretched face back to the interface. "She?" How could he even tell? There was nothing to be seen, no face or defining feature to the interface at all, just a short, small shadow that trembled where it stood, like a leaf swaying in the wind, clinging to a branch before it gets torn off and scattered…

Like a leaf… A leaf…

_I blew into this world on a leaf. I'm still blowing._

_I don't think I'll ever land_.

But she had. She _did_ – and yet Clara couldn't quite understand what this one had become.

"How'd she get there? Who put her there?"

"_Displacement_, Clara. Someone… Someone got to her before I… Before I could. And they ruined her."

But that couldn't be right, could it? Even a copy, a reflection, an echo of an echo of an echo, faded and broken off from the original word could still retain its own form of power. They'd be real – _real enough. _And they were made with one goal in mind:_find the Doctor, save the Doctor._

"_… As this one was born to do."_

So what went wrong here? What changed?

_But he never hears me. Almost never._ And what about seeing? If a person were an echo and that echo couldn't be heard, what would be the next best thing it tried? To be seen.

But an echo was sound, the way love could be a cage – but an echo suggested shape, its words and cries reflecting back to give form in a void, to give form to a voice.

And what happened when the form was taken away, removed? _Displaced?_

"Doctor. _Doctor_." Clara put her hands on his shoulders, those thin trembling arcs of bones that were so fragile under her hands, like a bird shuddering as it beat itself half to death against its cage, eager to be free. "Doctor, look at me. Look me in the eyes and tell me exactly what you told her."

"I _am _looking," he spat, bitter and angry but not at her. It was the sort of shout thrown out when you think there's no one listening. _He hardly ever hears me. But I've always been there. _"I'm always looking at you, Clara, it's _you _who can't see."

"Shut up. Less insults, more talk." Clara held his face gently, so gently, in her hands and could have screamed to see the way he flinched back from her touch. What was hurting him? What could hurt a man so badly that a simple, loving touch ached more than a thousand flames? "What did you _tell her_, Doctor?"

Groping blind and near to snarling for the effort, the Doctor held out his hand, took hold of the front of Clara's shirt, and _pulled_. She bent as close as she could to his muttering lips, watching as they fluttered the way a leaf curls up in the fire, ready to burn and char and die. And though it hurt her to do it, Clara tore her eyes off the Doctor's face, that wretched, precious, dearly beloved faced, and looked at the interface – _an echo, _my _echo. _One that didn't quite make it to her goal, and whose need and love for the Doctor was so bright it became a point of power and solace in a universe that offered so little of one and far too much of the other.

With her eyes on the echo – _CEO, my initials, and a code for boss; it's so sad it's almost clever _– and her ear bent to the Doctor's lips, Clara and the interface both listened to his secret, the one secret that burned so dark it was a kind of reverse light, a flame to guide and guard and char in equal, awful turns.

Because love wasn't just a cage. Love was a fire, an aeons-old flame that could take life and light and leap at the smallest of sparks.

"I love you. I love you, I have loved you, I am loving you. I see you, I hear you, I'm always seeing you – I always hear you. Always, Clara. _Always._"

Was it Clara's imagination, or did the interface – the echo – stand up a little straighter, as if preening with pride?

Clara stared at the echo, her other hand stroking the Doctor's tearless cheek, while his hand still clawed at her, aching for purchase. With his fingers dancing over her heart, Clara said to the echo, "You got that? You heard it, right? So stop it – let him go just… Just change him back." She stopped herself from saying please. _It's me, a part of me – a me that isn't me. It should know without being told. _Her thoughts were a mad, scrambling ramble and tangle, like thorns and vines and bramble trying to stitch together something like a cradle to keep herself together.

"_This _one didn't need to hear it," the echo said. "_This one_ already knew without being told."

Clara paused. She considered this, then considered it again, focusing on the emphasis.

When she looked down at the Doctor, his eyes were shut. They were ringed with red, but it was paling, fading – or could that be her imagination?

"Doctor? Hey, you. Give us a look."

His eyes were open at once. The shadows were still present, but weaker somehow, fading, the way the dawn devours the night – slowly, and then all at once. Just like the way love is born.

"That is one hell of a way to get a confession out of you."

* * *

><p>The TARDIS had already landed but they sat in silence, neither of them moving. Not close to each other, but close enough to keep the other in their sights. Their eyes didn't meet, only glanced around the edge, one looking up while the other pretended to notice something else. Neither one was fooled, but neither one said it – they didn't have to. They didn't need to be told.<p>

Clara made the first move, getting to her feet and twisting her hands together to make a little cradle of fingers whose nails had all but lost their varnish. At least they were shorter now: she'd gnawed them half to death on the trip back. "No more of this 'once in a blue moon' business, you hear me?" she said, talking to the Doctor's boots, his knees, to his left shoulder. Anything but his eyes, which were dead set focused on her.

"I hear you."

She looked at him, at the eyes whose shadows were paling still. Not quite right again, but at least the darkness was gone. _A secret that screamed to be seen. _"We're gonna get you on a schedule."

He huffed. "I hate schedules," he said, dangerously close to sounding petulant.

Clara couldn't help but smile. "And I hate not knowing when you'll get it into your head to turn up again."

She waited. He watched her. And then, surprising her, he said: "Tomorrow? How about… I mean, tomorrow. That works. I could – I could pop in tomorrow, and we could… I dunno, work something out then?"

"We could," Clara said, nodding. "That'd be nice." She turned and began to walk to the door. The handle in hand, she glanced back at him and paused – he had followed her, close enough to touch. "And what about after tomorrow?"

He smiled then, and the shadows were gone in one raw, vulnerable blaze. "Then we'll just have to find something else to talk about, shall we?"

Clara nodded, smiled, and then darted back to catch him in her arms before he could expect it. To his credit, he did very little complaining. But Clara knew without needing to be told that he didn't mind it so much – not from her.

* * *

><p><strong>Notes: <strong>A few maybe fun facts: Ruten is in fact an actual word, and it means exactly what the Doctor says it does. The title of the fic was inspired by two songs whose lyrics touch upon similar themes: alan's "Turn Into a Devil for Love" and Ayumi Hamasaki's "Terminal," both of which can be found through the usual Googling efforts. And last, but not least, I'm merely assuming Clara's middle name is something that begins with an E, and as it fit so nicely into the whole CEO/boss thing, I decided to run with it.

Thank you for reading and, of course, all your reviews and thoughts are greatly appreciated! You've all been so kind these past few weeks.


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